Wednesday, December 15, 2010

MetaverseVille? Second Life Advertised as Animal-Raising Game on Facebook!

While a FarmVille knockoff is using Second Life screenshots for its advertising, there's another ad campaign on Facebook coming from the other direction: Second Life itself is being advertised as an animal-caring social game on Facebook! SL designer Nylon Pinkney recently spotted this ad in her Faceook profile, presumably put there by Linden Lab. (The Corgi is actually an old variation of Second Life dog noted on NWN a couple years ago.) This campaign seems aimed at capturing the huge market of Facebook users who enjoy top social games like Pet Society, PetVille, Zoo World, and Happy Pets (which altogether, have about 40 million active players.) It will be interesting to see how much of this audience clicks through and ultimately transitions over to try Second Life. From my experience developing City of Eternals, I can say jumping a Facebook user from a 2D social game into a more 3D experience is quite challenging. Then again, if even 2.5% of that 40 million player base gave Second Life a try, that'd be a million new SL Residents.

I do however see a nice crossover with Mafia Wars for SL. It's called Pet Wars. When you kill enough kittens, you get to travel to other sims and start afresh.
I'm dusting off my Desert Eagle as we speak.

This only strengthens my believe that Linden Lab has a *horrible* Marketing department...
Yes, it's sort-of a step in the right direction, but as Laetitzia put it so perfectly, their is a HUGE gap between going to http://secondlife.com and actually raising puppies!

I guess LL is still closing it's eyes to the fact that getting people "to" SL isn't the hard bit, keeping them there is!

As a developer, I'm a firm believer in "under-promise and over-deliver". I realize that this mantra doesn't really apply to marketing, but I still see a high potential for marketing SL in this way to backfire.

I DON'T CARE ABOUT VIRTUAL PETS. THIS IMPLIES THAT VIRTUAL PETS ARE STUPID, PEOPLE WHO PLAY WITH THEM ARE STUPID, RELATED BUSINESSES ARE STUPID.

EVERY USE OF SECOND LIFE THAT I DON'T APPROVE OF IS STUPID AND WRONG. ITS MERE EXISTENCE DEMONSTRATES THAT LINDEN LAB ARE STUPID AND UNABLE TO PROPERLY FOCUS AND DO THE RIGHT THING.

(I don't even have a Facebook account, but still I'm amused by intolerant comments that always come out when this topic is discussed in relation with SL). Second Life can be many different things to many different kind of users. SURPRISE